Every glowing review received by the film “Coyote vs Acme” has acknowledged the act of having been able to see the film at all, and while I could add another thumbs-up to the pile it has received, the film’s commentary on corporations and the law make it a far more prescient release in 2026 than if Warner Bros had not shut it away as a tax write-off in 2023.
Having now read the original 1990 “New Yorker” humour piece, by Ian Frazier, on which “Coyote vs Acme” is based, presented as a dry opening statement by Wile E. Coyote’s lawyer at a trial, you can see how the film has expanded upon the apparent absurdity of applying cartoon logic to a real-life court case – the gag of an injury on “Mr Coyote’s” body turning him into an accordion being of a “distracting and embarrassing nature” which “has been a major impediment to Mr. Coyote’s pursuit of a normal social life” – while his exclusive use of Acme products is explained as their being the only domestic supplier of rocket sleds, spring-powered shoes and giant rubber bands, exploiting its advantage in the market: “One can only wonder what our trading partners in Western Europe and Japan would make of such a situation, where a giant company is allowed to victimize the consumer in the most reckless and wrongful manner over and over again.”
I loved how the film of “Coyote vs Acme” expanded upon this. With the courtroom relocated from Tempe, Arizona to Albuquerque, New Mexico, now depicted as the home to all Looney Tunes characters, we have a situation where “Human Law” and “Cartoon Law” is delineated separately: Wile E. Coyote’s pursuit of the Road Runner is defined as a line of work “pursuant to Sylvester vs Gonzalez”, in what might be the most clever wordplay I will come across this year.
However, the elastic nature of cartoon characters has led to a callousness in the practice of the law: the lawyer Kevin Avery, played by Will Forte, initially described Wile E. Coyote’s case as “a run of the mill $300 rocket skate case”, having already told Porky Pig, having had a window smash on him, that he could get $250 for that accident. Meanwhile the Acme Corporation, whose CEO is Foghorn Leghorn, and with legal counsel Buddy Crane played by John Cena, has separate human and cartoon product ranges, but has engaged in practices where products designed to help cartoon characters, like erasers to remove visible stink lines, became more recklessly made, using the data from real-life cartoon injuries in order to provide testing for its human product range, under a scheme named Project Sisyphus, confirming why Acme Corporation is happy to pay out a few hundred dollars here or there each time.
I was surprised that this was put in the mouth of a cartoon character, or that Foghorn Leghorn is played so meanly in “Coyote vs Acme”, but for the head of the Acme Corporation to say that pain is the price of progress, and cartoons are not important enough to care if they get harmed, leading to a very affecting moment where Road Runner testifies about the pain he has witnessed being inflicted on Wile E. Coyote, before asking, through Morse Code, “when are you coming back?” I had wondered if this had any correlation with Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification”, which he coincidentally coined during the time of this film’s production in 2022, but while that is more about an online service degrading the experience of its service for its users to benefit its business customers, then doing the same to them to take all the value for itself, it does play into how that term has been more widely adopted to indicate a deliberate degradation in services, products and experiences.
That said, “Coyote vs Acme” is easily the best feature film that the Looney Tunes characters have appeared in, is the best animation/live-action hybrid film since 1988’s “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, a tribute to how world-building and strong characterisation makes such a Looney world believable, qualms over the use of 3D animation to look 2D notwithstanding. The oddest part of the film, for me, is how the often-used caricature of Peter Lorre is an official Looney Tunes character now, and married to Granny?